BookRound brings public library books to people living in senior communities. Residents order on their phone or with help from staff, a driver collects the books from the library, delivers them to the front desk and takes the returns back. I designed the product for four roles, residents, facility staff, drivers and the business owner, and built a working demo of all of them.
In conversations with older adults living in senior communities, the same complaint kept coming up: the book collection in the building is small, and getting to the public library takes a ride, a good day and help with a heavy bag.
Many Connecticut libraries already offer homebound delivery, but it runs on phone calls and paper forms, often once a month, sometimes with only a handful of spots. The service exists. What's missing is a simple way to run it for a whole building at once.
The main users are residents of assisted and independent living, most of them well past 70. Many read every day, but small print, low contrast and glare make screens tiring. Some have stiff or shaky hands that miss small buttons. Some hear better than they see. Some have never ordered anything on a phone, and some never will.
So the product has to work three ways: a resident can use it alone, a family member can use it with them, or staff can order on their behalf. Every design decision started from the least confident user, not the average one.
The app uses Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface created by the Braille Institute for readers with low vision, where letters that are easy to confuse, like I, l and 1, look clearly different. Body text starts at 20 pixels, and residents choose from four sizes by tapping a button that is itself shown at that size, so they can see the result before they pick it.
Color is one blue on warm paper, with dark text that meets accessibility contrast guidelines. A status is never shown by color alone: "On the shelf" also has a check mark and words, "Must go back Thursday" has an alert icon. Main buttons are more than 56 pixels tall, there is one main action per screen, and labels say what happens in plain words: "I'm finished, return it."
Typing on a phone is the hardest part for many residents, and people rarely remember a full title and author. So search accepts whatever they have: part of a title, a last name, a misspelling, or what the book is about. "The fisherman one" finds The Old Man and the Sea, "austin" finds Jane Austen.
A Speak button turns speech into a search, and while it listens the microphone becomes a moving sound wave so it's clear the app is hearing them. Every screen has Read aloud, with a slower speed option, and each book's description can be listened to instead of read.
Connecticut law keeps library records confidential, and what someone reads can reveal things they haven't told anyone: a diagnosis, a loss, a worry. A delivery service sits right in the middle of those records, so privacy shaped the system from the start.
Books are tracked by library barcode, not title. Drivers see counts and barcodes only. Facility staff see how many books a resident has, and titles only if the resident chooses to allow staff help. The link between a book and a person is deleted when the book goes back. Using BookRound should expose a resident to no more risk than walking into the library themselves.
Drivers pick up open runs like a gig: first to accept gets it. A run is one library pickup and several front desks, with a window to finish, and location is shared only until the books are back at the library.
At each front desk the driver scans the return box against what residents marked for return. If a book isn't there, the driver doesn't search for it: finishing the scan asks the library to renew it, reminds the resident and tells the facility. At the library, a tap on "Books returned," at the desk or in the book drop, ends the run.
A community pays one monthly fee, based on how many residents actually ordered that month, so a building isn't charged for people who don't read. The plan moves up or down automatically, and the facility sees why before the bill arrives.
Staff manage library cards, delivery days and holiday changes, pause a resident who is in the hospital, or remove someone who has left, with every message stopping right away and a checklist so borrowed books get back to the library.
I used Claude to research how Connecticut libraries run homebound delivery, what the state's library privacy law requires, and what senior communities cost and how big they are, then to turn each decision into a working screen the same day.
Every flow was clicked through in automated browser tests, from a resident's request to a driver's return scan, so I could keep changing the product and spend my time on judgment: what an 85-year-old reader, a busy activities director or a driver on a schedule actually needs.
The next step is a pilot with one local library and one senior community: connecting to the library's catalog for live availability and holds, and agreeing how drivers collect holds and how drop-off counts as the return time.
After that come real accounts for residents, staff and drivers, and testing the app with residents themselves, watching where they hesitate, and making those moments simpler.
Designing for the least confident user made BookRound better for everyone: bigger targets, plainer words and fewer steps help the activities director and the driver as much as the resident.
It also reflects how I work: understand everyone the product touches, including the people who never open it, like the librarian and the family, then design the hard parts so they feel simple.
I design and build products for real businesses, from the first conversation to working software.
Get in touch